Chapter 21 – King Me
The Emperor paused his pen when he reached the name.
Erynd Milton.
Neat ink, tucked into a routine report from the Academy's Keeper of Records. First-week evaluations. Minor incidents. Recommended follow-ups.
His eyes slid to the margin note beside it.
[Comment by Professor Garen: "This boy handles a wooden sword like a man who's already chosen a Derivation."]
The Emperor's fingers tightened for a moment.
Derivation.
Milton.
He leaned back in his chair, letting the soft ticking of the clock and the distant murmur of the capital fill the study. Beyond the window, lights scattered across the city like embers — warm now, not burning.
Milton.
He closed his eyes.
And remembered when everything *had* been on fire.
***
The palace had smelled like metal and smoke that night.
Not incense. Not oil. Real smoke — thick, dirty, bitten through with the copper tang of blood. It crawled in under doors and through arrow slits, carrying the taste of streets outside choking on civil war.
The great map table in the war room was a mess of markers: regiments, bastions, rebel lines.
One by one, those markers had been swept away over the week.
"Your Majesty, we must move you to the inner vaults," a minister said, voice shaking. His rich sleeves trembled as much as his hands.
The Emperor stood in half-armor over formal robes, crown sitting heavy on his brow. He studied the board, jaw locked.
"The western gate fell at dusk," another man rushed out. "If the traitors push straight for the palace—"
A horn sounded outside.
Not the clean call of Imperial trumpets.
A rough, ugly note. Answered by another. Closer.
"How many loyal knights remain inside the palace?" the Emperor asked.
The captain of the royal guard answered without glancing at the ministers.
"Two full squads on the inner rings, one more pulling wounded. The rest are holding the courtyard approaches. Sir Viester is still at the front gate."
"Pull him back," the Emperor said.
"The gate will fall without him," the captain replied quietly.
"It will fall *anyway*," the Emperor said. "If it does, I'm the one they want. There is no point to this crown if my head isn't under it. Bring him here."
The captain hesitated only a heartbeat, saluted, and strode out.
The Emperor exhaled once.
The war had begun as grumbling. Taxes. Border disputes. Distant skirmishes.
Now it was here.
"Your Majesty…" The oldest minister swallowed. "If the palace is breached—"
"Then we fight in the halls," the Emperor said. "And if we can't hold the halls, we fight in this room."
He reached for the sword resting against his chair and drew it.
Steel rasped cleanly from scabbard. Not ornament — a real blade, worn smooth on the grip from younger battles. He was no Sword Master, but his hands remembered its weight.
The ministers looked away from the sight.
Armored footsteps thundered in the corridor.
The doors burst open.
For a breath, every hand went to a hilt.
Then they saw the lion sigil on the torn surcoat.
Viester Milton stepped in, leaving muddy, bloody footprints on polished stone.
His armor was dented and scorched. A gouge ran along his pauldron, where something heavy had tried to bite through to bone. His sword hung loose in his right hand, tip wet. A faint shimmer of pale light clung to the steel, like heat over a forge — sword aura not yet completely drawn back.
Behind him staggered what remained of a squad. Some limping, one with his arm bound in a bloody sling. Every man stained red.
Not all of it theirs.
"Report," the Emperor said.
Viester's grey eyes swept the room once, mapping exits, people, smoke, before dropping to one knee.
"The west gate is broken," he said. His voice was calm, as if he'd just come from a drill yard, not a slaughter. "We held as long as we could. The traitors paid for every stone."
"And now?" the Emperor asked.
"Now they push for the palace," Viester said. "Your Majesty, this room is a bad position. Too many doors. Too many angles. We have to narrow the approach."
The Emperor glanced at the four doors.
"You think they'll come this far," he said.
"I would," Viester replied.
There was no pride in it. Just truth.
He stood, walked to the map table, and with the flat of his sword nudged carved banners inward — rebel lines pushing through broken walls toward the palace ring.
"How many men do they have?" the Emperor asked.
"Enough," Viester said. "But not enough to reach you while I'm standing."
A minister made a strangled noise in his throat.
The Emperor studied the man in front of him.
In another life, Viester could have been a scholar — quiet, watchful, always counting things others missed. Instead, all that attention had been poured into one thing: a blade.
He wasn't just a knight.
He was something rarer.
A Sword Master.
"What do you need?" the Emperor asked.
Viester did not waste the gift.
"Bar three of the doors, leave one," he said. "Pull the ministers back into the inner chamber behind that wall." He tapped a place on the stone with his sword. "Two squads with them. Clear this corridor—" another tap "—and then abandon it. I want them funneled into a single path."
"And you?" the Emperor asked.
Viester looked him in the eye.
"I hold the path," he said.
Another distant boom shook the room. Dust drifted from beams overhead.
The Emperor nodded once.
"You heard him," he said.
The war room turned into a construction site for survival: soldiers hammering bars into place, heavy cabinets dragged to block side doors, wide eyes of ministers herded through a hidden panel. The space emptied until only a handful remained.
The Emperor.
The captain.
Eight knights.
Viester.
Smoke thickened. Somewhere beyond the walls, metal screamed. Somewhere a gate finally gave way with a sound like the world cracking.
The corridor beyond their chosen door went quiet.
"Positions," Viester murmured.
He stepped into the doorway, raising his sword.
The Emperor took a place just behind him, blade drawn, helm over crown. The remaining knights formed a shallow V to either side, so anyone entering would be forced into crossed steel.
Silence.
Then boots. Dozens. Echoing.
The first rebel rounded the corner at a run, shield up, sword high. His armor bore the sigil of an outer duke, smeared over with a strip of black cloth tied around his arm: the mark of a traitor.
Viester moved the instant the man appeared.
His blade swung once.
To the Emperor, it looked like a simple horizontal cut.
To Viester, it was a solved problem.
He saw the man as lines — the curve of shield, the angle of shin, the exposed gap near the hip joint. In his mind, faint, thin paths sketched themselves across that shape. One, through the thigh. One, under the shield rim. One, across the fingers if the man tried to raise it higher.
Sword aura, pale and almost invisible, clung around the edge of his steel, extending those lines a fraction beyond the metal.
His Derivation whispered to him.
[Counted Paths.]
He chose one.
The blade crossed the space in the most efficient horizontal route his body could take. The edge slipped under the shield, struck the inner thigh where armor was weakest, and did not stop — momentum carrying it on just enough to rip muscle and tendons.
The rebel's leg failed. He dropped, shield tilting just enough to open his neck.
A tiny adjustment of Viester's wrists turned the horizontal line into a short diagonal, snapping up through the throat.
Blood sprayed the doorframe.
Viester let the man fall in the gap, body already an obstacle, and slid his foot half a step back to reset his stance.
More rebels crashed in behind the first.
They tried to shove the corpse aside.
It slowed them.
Viester met them.
The Emperor watched steel move like arithmetic.
Every cut and parry was small, precise. Viester's shoulders stayed level. His sword never swung wider than necessary. He turned incoming blades with slight rotations, letting them glance off his aura-thickened edge or flat, stealing their force instead of contesting it head-on.
Four rebels tried to force the doorway with shields raised.
"Shields up!" someone shouted behind them.
Viester's attention touched them once.
Four new paths traced themselves in his mind — horizontal across ankles, low diagonal across the lead man's calf, a short step inward that would bring the second man's shield edge crashing into his own ally's ribs.
His sword moved.
He struck the lower rim of the front shield, aura thickening along the edge to add weight. The blow hammered the wood up into the man's own face; teeth snapped, nose broke. Before the shield could fall, Viester had already stepped aside, letting a spear thrust flash through the air his chest had occupied a moment earlier.
He caught the shaft under his arm, locked it, and yanked.
The spearman stumbled forward.
A thin vertical path flickered in his thoughts — from collar gap to spine.
The sword punched in, following that straight line perfectly.
The corridor began to fill with bodies.
They stacked under the doorway, forcing the attackers to climb over their own dead. Boots slipped on blood-slick stone. Every time someone's foot slid, Viester was already moving into that opening — a short cut behind a knee, a thrust into an exposed armpit, a quick flick to take fingers off a sword hilt.
Once, a man's weapon went spinning to clatter at the Emperor's feet.
The Emperor did not stoop for it.
He watched one of the things that separated Sword Masters from everyone else.
Mages had their own ladder of power. Most never climbed above the third tier. A fifth-tier court mage could flatten a company. The seventh tier — true Tower mages, like Merlin in the old stories — were said to condense every spell they'd ever cast into a single core truth: their *Origin*.
Origin warped the rules of magic around them. Spells bent to that truth. Fire that didn't burn its caster. Lightning that ignored metal and only struck marked targets. A private law imposed on mana.
Sword Masters were the Empire's answer.
They didn't change magic.
They changed *reality's tolerance for their blade*.
All the drills, duels, and battles of a lifetime compressed into one distilled idea:
A Derivation.
Where Origin rewrote the grammar of spells, Derivation rewrote how the world allowed steel to move.
Some Sword Masters bent distance, turning short cuts into long-reaching arcs. Some severed intent, cutting spells or killing blows before they fully formed. Others accepted every attack, turning their bodies into walking fortresses.
Viester's was simpler. Crueler.
[Counted Paths.]
He saw possible cuts and thrusts as lines — rigid, clean, like chalk strokes on a slate. He didn't see one option. He saw dozens at once, interlocking, crossing. Each line came with cost: time, stamina, opening.
His Derivation allowed one rule:
*Any path he fully counted and chose became inevitable.*
His body, his aura, and the world around his blade would *cooperate* to make that line real — nudging footing, guiding momentum, shaving away wasted effort. It didn't make him faster than physics, but it made his chosen route the easiest for everything to fall into.
The Emperor watched men die on those lines.
"Back line!" someone shouted.
Archers.
They formed behind the press, bows raised over helmets.
"Down!" the captain barked.
There was nowhere to go.
Viester didn't withdraw.
He took one quick step forward, grabbed the last man he'd cut down by the broken breastplate straps, and heaved the corpse up. Sword aura flared, muscles screaming as he used every ounce of leverage to jam the body diagonally across the doorway.
"Hold," he snapped.
The first volley flew.
Arrows thudded into dead flesh, rattling armor. One shaft punched through meat and slammed into stone just beside the Emperor's helm.
The Emperor held his ground.
Viester listened. Counted the heartbeats between draws. The creak of bowstrings. The shuffled timing of tired arms.
"One," he breathed.
Second volley.
The corpse shook under the impact.
"Two."
Bowstrings sang again.
"Now."
He shoved the dead man forward and down.
The body crashed into the archers' own front line, tangling legs. Men staggered. For half a breath, their formation rippled.
In that slip — in that single counted gap — Viester moved.
He plunged through the doorway, into the corridor.
From the war room, it looked like chaos. Steel, shouting, bodies.
From inside his head, it was lines.
Three slashing paths through spear hafts. One tight thrust into the gap under an archer's ribs as the man tried to nock. A low arc across two sets of ankles as they both tried to backpedal over a corpse.
Every time he chose, Derivation locked his body to that decision.
Aura condensed along his blade, the air bending just enough to let his cut glide unhindered even where footing should have failed him.
A spearhead skidded along his pauldron, drawn away by the subtle drag of his aura rather than biting deep. A sword that should have met his neck instead scraped a rib as his chosen step carried him half an inch lower than panic would have allowed.
An axe came in from the side, fast, aimed for his head.
Viester dipped under it, felt the haft slam against the top of his shoulder and glance away.
He didn't flinch.
He pinned the axe with his left forearm, trapping it between vambrace and body, then stabbed three rapid, efficient times under the attacker's arm, precisely where the lines in his mind overlapped: lung, lung, heart.
The man dropped, dragging the weapon down with him.
Viester's breathing roughened, puffing fog through the slits of his visor. He felt the weight of every cut in his bones. Aura frayed at the edges.
He kept moving.
Civil war was not the first thing that had taught Viester to kill like this.
Loss had done that earlier.
On some quieter evening, in a manor far from the capital, he'd held his newborn son alone in a dim room that smelled of herbs and blood. The midwife had bowed and stepped back. The bed had been still.
Elizabeth had been warm in his memories and cold in the sheets.
He'd buried her with two promises in his chest:
Serve the Empire.
Raise the boy she never got to hold.
Now, halfway down a corridor of bodies, his leg finally paid the price of his choices.
He misjudged a patch of blood.
A boot slid.
A greatsword — wielded by a rebel with more training than the rest — came in low, edge scraping along the gap between greave and cuisse.
Pain bit deep, hot and white.
His knee almost folded.
For a heartbeat, the lines scattered. The neat grid of possible paths blew apart into static. Aura flickered.
The rebel braced for a finishing blow.
Viester didn't see him.
He saw a front hall at Milton Manor.
A small blond boy standing there with both hands wrapped around a wooden sword that was too big for him, staring up with serious eyes that matched his own.
He saw Elizabeth, not as she had died, but as he remembered her in candlelight — laughing at some clumsy thing he'd said. In his mind, they stood side by side, impossible and perfect: his wife's hand resting on their son's hair.
*You promised,* that impossible picture seemed to say.
Not in words. In the weight it carried.
You promised to serve.
You promised to come home.
You promised to make my death mean something other than an ending.
His breath hitched.
He slammed his left foot down, forcing the knee to lock. Aura flowed to brace it, turning pain into a clear, sharp point to balance on.
The lines snapped back into place.
The rebel's sword was still rising for the second strike when Viester's blade moved — a short vertical path that he seized with everything he had left.
The cut took the man's hands at the wrists.
Fingers and steel flew.
Before the scream had fully left the man's mouth, Viester drove his sword through his throat.
He yanked it free, blood pattering the already red floor.
The corridor finally broke.
What remained of the traitors fell back, stumbling over their own wounded, leaving a trail of groans and weaponry behind. None of them found the courage to rush that doorway again immediately.
In the lull, only the moans of the dying and the crackle of distant fires filled the air.
Viester backed into the war room again, limping now, one leg dragging slightly, armor cracked open in half a dozen places. Blood leaked down to drip from his gauntlet.
He still stood straight.
His sword point did not waver.
"Your Majesty," the captain said, voice hoarse. "That's only one approach. They'll try the inner halls next. The vault passages. The servants' ways."
"They will," Viester said. His eyes stayed on the corridor. "But they've lost their push. They sent the bulk of their first wave and broke on this doorway. What comes next will be smaller — angrier, but less organized."
As if called by his words, fresh footsteps echoed.
These were heavier.
Armored, measured. No panicked running. No jostling.
A gap opened in the pile of bodies as men were dragged aside.
The traitor lord himself walked into view.
Full plate chased in gold. Crest of his house defaced by a strip of black cloth nailed straight through the metal. Six heavily armed knights behind him, visors down.
He stopped just beyond the reach of Viester's blade, surveying the carnage.
"Your Majesty!" he called down the corridor, voice carrying. "You drag this Empire through ruin for your own pride. Surrender now. I might let you die quickly."
The Emperor did not answer.
Viester took one slow breath and stepped forward until shadow from the doorway framed him.
"Milton," the rebel lord said when he recognized him. His lip curled. "I should have guessed. Still kneeling to crowns when you could have taken one."
"This isn't kneeling," Viester said. "This is choosing."
The traitor lord tilted his head.
"Kill him," he ordered.
The six knights strode forward.
They tried to enter two at a time, flanking the doorway to overwhelm him. Their armor was better, their stances disciplined. Men who hadn't broken earlier in the night.
Viester let them cross the threshold.
The first pair pressed in, trying to pin his blade with the combined weight of their greatswords.
He saw the narrow, ugly set of paths in front of him — little room, no space to retreat, two blades descending. Many options. Most ended with him dead.
One didn't.
He chose it.
He cut at the inside of the left knight's shield elbow. Aura thickened just for that instant, adding weight to the strike.
Bone cracked.
The shield dropped.
He pivoted, turning his body so the right knight's sword slammed into his own aura-wrapped blade and slid along it, redirected into the staggered ally's chest instead of his.
Their footwork tangled.
Before either could recover, Viester's sword flashed twice, short and brutal. One line across a visor slit, another thrust under a raised arm.
Two bodies fell.
The remaining four had to step over them, losing formation.
Derivation turned that into an opening.
One swung down from above. Viester didn't try to meet the full force. He stepped in, shaving inches off the strike's reach so it carved into the stone at his heel. His counter cut traced a tight lower arc he'd already counted — through outer knee, across unarmored joint.
Another lunged for his ribs. His shield caught the blade, twisting at just the right angle so its own force jerked the attacker off-balance, half-turning him into the path of his comrade's follow-up.
Viester's own sword filled the newly cleared line, punching under a bevor into soft throat.
The fifth knight managed a scoring cut along Viester's side, teeth of a mace biting into torn mail. Pain roared across his ribs.
He accepted it.
Sometimes the only path that ended at survival passed straight through a wound.
He let Derivation guide his next step, not away from the pain but *with* it — using the pull of the mace to bring the knight almost chest-to-chest. His sword's point drove up from below, between plates, into the gap behind the man's knee. A twist. A push.
The knight crumpled.
The sixth lasted longer.
He was genuinely skilled. Their blades rang again and again, sparks blooming in the smoky air. For the first time that night, the Emperor saw Viester forced back two full steps.
Then Viester let his next parry come a fraction late.
The sixth knight saw it and committed with everything he had, sword sweeping across in a powerful horizontal cut meant to cleave armor and ribs.
Viester dropped low, Derivation anchoring his knees despite protest from torn muscle. The blade hissed over his helm. His own sword traced an ugly, short path he'd kept in reserve — back and up, carving through the gap at the back of the knee.
The man screamed, collapsing.
Viester's follow-up thrust ended it.
Six armored bodies lay strewn in the doorway.
Only the traitor lord remained.
For the first time, his confident posture cracked.
He looked from his dead knights to Viester, standing there bleeding, aura flickering like a barely contained storm around the sword.
He glanced past him, toward the Emperor.
Fear flickered in his eyes.
The Emperor said nothing.
The rebel lord raised his greatsword, both hands wrapping tight around the hilt.
"Last offer, Milton," he called. "Join me. I can give you your own throne. Why die for a man too weak to save his own city?"
Viester's reply was flat.
"I already have a king," he said.
They closed.
This was not Derivation versus Derivation, Origin versus Origin.
It was a man who'd clawed his way to the edge of human limits with a concept burned into his bones, against a man who thought power came from title and steel alone.
The first clashes shook dust from the ceiling. Greatsword against longsword, weight against inevitability. The rebel's blows were heavy, designed to crush through guards, to batter armor apart.
Viester met them with the smallest possible counters — deflecting, not blocking. His aura ran along the enemy blade, turning absolute impacts into glancing slides wherever he could.
Still, some got through.
The rebel feinted high, then twisted low, driving the point of his greatsword toward Viester's wounded leg again.
There was no perfect answer.
Every line he saw ended in damage.
He picked the one that cost least.
The blade caught more armor than flesh this time, screeching across metal. His knee screamed anyway. Pain ripped up his leg, threatened to lock it.
He turned that locked joint into a pivot.
His sword rose in a tight path he'd left unused until now — a short, vicious arc aimed not at throat or heart, but hands.
Steel met flesh.
Fingers scattered on bloody stone.
The greatsword crashed down, ownerless.
The traitor lord staggered back, staring in disbelief at the red stumps where his grip had been.
Viester stepped in, grabbed the front of his breastplate, and hauled him forward until their helmets nearly touched.
"You raised your hand against your Emperor," he said quietly. "You dragged your people into this."
The rebel's eyes rolled with panic.
"Mer—"
The sword punched through his throat.
Viester held him there a breath longer, letting the sight sink into any watching eyes — the would-be usurper, gagging on his own blood, black cloth over his crest drowned in red.
Then he let go.
The body fell with a hollow crash.
Silence settled over the war room again.
The Emperor realized his fingers ached from how hard he'd been gripping his sword. His breath fogged the inside of his helm.
He stepped forward.
Viester turned to meet him, limping slightly now. His armor was a ruin — dented, cut, leaking blood from too many points to count. Aura had thinned to a bare shimmer hugging the steel, stretched thin but still there.
"Your Majesty," he said.
The Emperor looked past him, down the corridor clogged with dead men. Then back at the knight who'd kept that line from reaching the throne.
"You ended it," the Emperor said quietly.
Viester shook his head once.
"I ended *this*," he said. "The war doesn't die with one man. You know that."
"Maybe not," the Emperor said. "But I'd be dead without you. And when they tell this story, they'll say the traitors broke their teeth on the palace walls… because a Sword Master counted every path they could take and closed them."
Viester's jaw tightened.
"You are already more than a knight," the Emperor continued. "The court will have to recognize that. Titles can wait until after we put out all these fires. But when this is done, your house will not remain minor."
Viester looked like he wanted to argue.
The captain coughed, glancing at the wounded, the unconscious, the smoldering city beyond the walls.
Viester swallowed it, bowed his head.
"As you command," he said.
Behind his closed eyes, for one heartbeat, he saw Elizabeth smiling and a small boy clutching a wooden sword, both waiting at a door that had never seen them together in life.
It was enough to keep him standing.
***
The Emperor opened his eyes.
The quiet study returned. The war room was long cleaned. The bodies burned. The rebel banners gone. Viester's Derivation had been given a formal name in chronicles: [Counted Paths].
Elizabeth had died long ago.
The boy she'd left behind was now twelve and swinging wooden swords at an Academy that pretended to be neutral while existing under his charter.
The Emperor looked down again at the report.
[Erynd Milton. First year. House Milton (Viscount).]
Garen's note still sat in the margin.
["Refuses to lean on magic. Treats sword aura as if it were a spell formula. Reads distance and timing like a veteran. If he ever defines a Derivation, it will be dangerous."]
The Emperor's mouth twitched.
Of course Garen had recognized it. The old man had seen enough Sword Masters to know the shape of one before it fully formed.
The Emperor set the parchment aside for a moment, walked to the window, and stared out at the city — at streets that, thanks to one night and one man, still belonged to the Argent Crown.
"It seems," he murmured, "my old friend's son is interesting too."
The weight of the crown felt a shade lighter.
He went back to the desk, picked up his pen, and in the margin beneath Garen's words added his own neat line:
[Monitor his progress closely.]
Then he signed it with the seal of the Argent Crown.